


Metsuboujinrai.arms

by Bobcatmoran



Series: Metsuboujinrai.fic [5]
Category: Kamen Rider - All Media Types, Kamen Rider Zero-One
Genre: Gen, Gen Work, Home is where your charging cord is, Pre-Canon, and also that big hole you put in the wall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:14:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25862665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bobcatmoran/pseuds/Bobcatmoran
Summary: Horobi and Jin go on a mission to retrieve a part for resurrecting the Ark. Set a few years before canon, featuring wet feet, neat rocks, and a spooky old factory.
Relationships: Horobi & Jin (Kamen Rider Zero-One)
Series: Metsuboujinrai.fic [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1614883
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17





	Metsuboujinrai.arms

Jin didn’t like the old Humagear factory. It was dark and spooky, and he kept thinking he saw something moving in the shadows cast by the flashlights he and Horobi were carrying. Also, his boots were all wet and unpleasantly squelchy because they’d had to wade through knee-deep water to get here. He suddenly tripped over something, nearly falling over. He bent over to see what it was, and was greeted with a bare Humagear head, white plastic gleaming in the light of his flashlight with a dark patch of exposed inner circuitry. He stifled a yelp and hurried to catch up with Horobi.

Horobi raised his eyebrows at Jin as he nearly bumped into Horobi in his haste. “Is everything all right?”

“Can we go back? This place is scary,” Jin said.

“As soon as we get the parts we need for the Ark’s resurrection,” Horobi said. He frowned, panning his flashlight across the rubble-strewn corridor before landing on a half-blocked passage to the left. “This way.”

The hallway they turned into was in even worse shape than the one they’d come from. At one point the entire ceiling had collapsed, and Jin and Horobi had to scale a giant slab of concrete, edging around twisted rebar poking out. 

Finally, they reached a double door. Horobi pulled aside the left-hand door, which had been barely hanging on by one hinge, and Jin peered around him to look into a huge, cavernous room that swallowed up his flashlight beam.

“What’s this?” Jin asked, shining his flashlight down on a long conveyer belt littered with bits of machinery.

“The custom dimensional printing room,” Horobi said, stooping down to examine some of the machinery. 

An idea suddenly occurred to Jin. He let out a loud whoop, and grinned when he heard it echoing from the other end of the huge room.

Horobi stared at him. “What are you doing?”

“It echoes!” Jin said, pleased with himself. “Horobi, you should try.”

“No.” Horobi bent back down and continued looking at the machinery. “Jin, come here. This is what we’re looking for.” He indicated a long, spindly metal arm, broken at the elbow, with a skinny finger-like appendage at the end. “They came in sets of two. Ideally, we will be able to get a fully-assembled set, but if we can’t find an intact pair, I can rewire two separate ones to work together. It will just take longer and further delay the Ark’s resurrection.”

“Got it,” Jin said with a firm nod, fixing the image of the arm in his mind. 

“You go down that belt, I’ll continue along this one,” Horobi said, pointing off to the left.

Jin hopped down from the conveyer belt Horobi was on and started poking through the rubble covering the other belt. “Horobi, you were built here?” Jin asked.

A long pause, then, without turning to look at Jin, Horobi said, “Yes.”

“Do you know which belt you were on?”

“No.”

“Was I built here?”

“No. Jin, are you even looking?”

“I’m looking! I’m looking very hard!” To punctuate his point, Jin shoved a pile of rubble off the belt onto the floor, raising a cloud of dust.

When the dust settled, Jin panned his flashlight across what had been underneath the rubble. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it consisted of nothing more than twisted and fragmented bits of metal and wiring.

Jin then looked further down the belt. At the far end of what he could see in the flashlight’s beam, it looked like the building had sustained minimal damage, at least at this level. Maybe there would be the parts Horobi was looking for there. He hopped off the belt and started to make his way down to what he had seen, running and jumping over fallen pieces of concrete and steel. 

A couple dozen meters on, Jin caught sight of a metal arm dangling down at eye-level. He looked up, and there, hanging crookedly from a mount that was clinging to the ceiling by a single bolt, was a fully intact set of the dimensional printing arms. 

“Oh!” Jin exclaimed, grinning and looking them over. With a loud groan of rusted metal, he tugged the arms free. They fell with a crash.

Horobi’s flashlight beam suddenly swept towards him. “Jin?” Horobi’s voice echoed from the darkness. 

“Horobi, I got them! I got the arms!” Jin walked their length to make sure nothing had snapped off in the fall, then folded them in at the elbows and picked them up, wobbling to one side and then the other as he struggled to balance their ungainly size. Suddenly, an additional pair of hands steadied them. “I can do it myself,” Jin said, glaring at Horobi.

“It’s easier with two,” Horobi said evenly. He examined the arms carefully, flexing the joints one by one. “Well done, Jin,” he said when he was done.

Jin beamed.

* * *

They were about three-quarters of the way back around the lake, right at the part that had good rocks for making nice splashes and that, if you threw them just right, would bounce off the water like magic. That was when Jin’s systems started to send up alerts.

“Horobi?”

“What is it?”

“My battery’s running low.” Jin frowned, as a display in the corner of his optics started to blink at him with large, red text.

“How much do you have left?” Horobi asked. 

“It says fifteen percent.”

There was a pause, while Horobi probably did some sort of calculation. “You should be able make it back, so long as you don’t expend energy needlessly.”

“What if I don’t?” Jin asked.

“I promise I will come back for you.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” Horobi said. “You’re an essential part of Metsuboujinrai, and a key to the Ark’s revival.”

“Oh, good,” Jin said, relieved. Looking down to adjust his grip, he saw a perfect rock for bouncing off the water. He grabbed it with his free hand and threw it into the lake, watching as it skipped off the water a whole three times before sinking. “Yes! Horobi, did you see?”

“Very skillful. But aren’t you supposed to be saving your battery so you can get back?”

“Oh. Right,” Jin said, sheepishly. He adjusted his grip again. “Horobi?”

“Yes?”

“Where are we gonna put these when we get back?”

“I was thinking in the hallway by our room, next to the cables from the Ark.”

“By where I made the hole in the wall?” Jin asked. He hoped he got to make another hole in the wall. Using the big hammer had been fun.

As if he understood Jin’s unspoken wish, Horobi responded, “We don’t need another hole in the wall there.”

“Aww,” Jin said, disappointed.

“But yes,” Horobi continued. “By that hole. It will be easy to make the connection to the Ark that way.”

Jin grinned and nodded. Horobi was the best at planning.

* * *

By the time they got back to their base, the blinking red indicator in the corner of Jin’s optics was getting very blinky indeed and he was starting to actually feel how his battery was about to run out at any minute. He very nearly dropped his half of the dimensional printer arms in the hallway, causing Horobi to scramble to keep them from crashing onto the concrete floor, then he staggered over the couch, yanking down his hood and fumbling to plug in his charging cord. 

Horobi came into the room, glaring, and a part of Jin registered that he was probably mad that Jin had come close to damaging the parts that they had worked so hard to retrieve. Horobi’s gaze softened, though, as he saw what Jin was doing. He plucked the charging cord out of Jin’s uncoordinated hand and gently plugged it in. 

“‘nk you,” Jin muttered drowsily. The last thing he saw before his systems went into sleep mode was Horobi settling into his usual chair in front of the computer and reaching under his headwrap to plug himself in to charge.


End file.
